Smell leads police to "worst meth lab they've ever seen"

With the windows open and the ceiling fan on, Ada Siglar said she and her husband were getting a nice breeze Monday night — up until the point when a bad smell, which turned out to be a meth lab, swept through their home.

"We had to shut every door and window that we could because it was so bad," said Siglar, who lives a few houses down from 1719 Pollack Ave., where police busted a meth lab about 11:45 p.m.

"It was horrible," she said.

According to an Evansville Police Department incident report, officers responded to a resident's complaint of the odor and found an "alarming" and "intense" smell of ammonia in the air.

"It smelled like a combination of bleach and cat (feces)," Siglar said. "It was so bad, my husband held a towel to his mouth to breathe."

Police suspected that the smell's source was a barn behind 1719 Pollack Ave., and once they got about 50 yards away, they had to turn around because of the odor's strength, the report said.

Equipped with gas masks, police found the barn's door half open and saw several meth-making materials in plain view, the report said.